Court zaps ComEd for 2011 storm outages

The Illinois Appellate Court today upheld a state utility regulators' ruling last year that Commonwealth Edison Co. must reimburse up to 35,000 customers, as well as affected municipalities, for damages stemming from long outages during severe storms in the summer of 2011.

The Illinois Commerce Commission determined last year that, among the hundreds of thousands who lost power for more than four hours at a time during a series of intense storms three years ago, some 34,559 were “preventable.” ComEd executives at the time said the ruling misinterpreted a state law passed in the 1990s after a series of “blue sky” outages. That statute, ComEd said, never was intended to apply to storm-related power losses.

“It is clear from the commission's decision that it concluded that ComEd could and should have trimmed the trees to prevent limbs from swaying into power lines,” Judge James Epstein wrote in his decision.

What's more, the court said, ComEd can't collect from ratepayers the cost of notifying eligible customers that they can recover their losses.

ComEd has said the ICC's ruling could result in claims payments of $30 million or more. And it's expressed concern that the ruling will set a precedent that would set the utility up for huge losses in the future, particularly as storms become more severe in an era of climate change.

In a statement, ComEd said it is disappointed by the ruling. "The statute was put in place to ensure that electric utilities are held accountable for system reliability while acknowledging that severe weather is beyond our control," the utility wrote. "We believe the decision misinterprets the intent of the statute."

ComEd said it has received 1,094 claims to date from affected customers. ComEd did not notify all of the customers while the ruling was being appealed.

The decision is the latest in a series of setbacks in the Appellate Court for ComEd. A little over a week ago, it lost an appeal of an ICC order requiring utilities to levy a surcharge on all customer bills to pay for the federally subsidized FutureGen "clean coal" plant to built in downstate Meredosia.

And before that the court rejected ComEd's appeal of the ICC's rate interpretations of the 2011 "smart grid" law that authorized annual increases to pay for $2.6 billion in upgrades to ComEd's system.